WASHINGTON — Chinese and U.S. officials from online payment companies signed a partnership Monday to ease the sale of plane tickets to the USA and elsewhere, with the goal of dramatically expanding foreign travel.

Chinese Embassy officials congratulated the payment companies for the agreement between Washington-based UATP, which stands for Universal Air Travel Plan and is owned by airlines worldwide, and China-based Alipay International, which primarily serves consumers there.

Both companies act like PayPal to provide transactions that customers trust, and the goal is to expand foreign travel, after 83 million Chinese traveled abroad last year.

Tian Deyou, the Chinese Embassy's minister counselor for the economic and commercial office, said the agreement would promote business investments, education and tourism.

"This collaboration will provide more reliable, more efficient and convenient travel services between China and the United States," said Deyou, who attended the signing.

The company was created in 2004 to build trust among Chinese consumers skeptical of ordering anything over the Internet. But Li Jingming, an Alipay vice president, said customers now routinely use the company to pay for entertainment, electric bills and even restaurant tabs.

"It opens up hundreds of millions of Chinese customers to U.S. businesses," Jingming said of the agreement.

As with PayPal, Alipay customers can use credit cards, debit cards or cash from a bank account to pay for a transaction, Jingming said. Alipay has two types of transactions: money can either be transferred directly to a merchant or held in escrow, to ensure that a customer is satisfied with the product they bought before the money is released, he said.

Alipay signed the agreement with UATP to smooth access to its worldwide network of airlines, hotels and other travel products. And UATP sees the prospect of hundreds of millions of new customers, a fraction of whom spent $102 billion aboard last year, according to CEO Ralph Kaiser.

"We really think this is going to be a huge opportunity for everybody involved," Kaiser said. "We think the sky's the limit."

The potential for new customers is enormous. Boeing Co., the airplane manufacturer, projected in September that Chinese airlines would buy nearly 6,000 new planes during the next 20 years, to triple the size of their fleets.

Travel experts caution that hurdles remain for travel between China and the U.S.

Victoria Day, a spokeswoman for the industry group Airlines for America, said each airline will determine which payment methods they will accept. But she said Chinese face a bigger challenge than buying plane tickets in obtaining visas to visit the USA.

"While the U.S. visa issuance situation has improved significantly, it can improve even more and is why we support efforts to improve visa issuance in countries such as China," Day said.

Robert Mann, an airline industry consultant at R.W. Mann and Co. Inc., said the open questions will be how fast customers will buy tickets and how soon airlines boost service to China.

"The issue really is to break down any U.S. carrier reluctance to deal with any other form of payment," Mann said. "It breaks down one more barrier — not the last by any means — to facilitating travel between the regions."

Deyou, the embassy minister counselor, said the U.S. government has added about 50 staffers to process visa applications in China and that procedures are better than several years ago.

"I think the U.S. ambassador to China has done a good job in the past few years," he said. "It is improving."